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I will never forget that
feeling. We drove to the next town over
to buy gas, and we sat in line, waiting.
The prices steadily rose until someone important finally said, “No, put
the prices back where they belong.”

We filled each of our vehicles out
of fear that the gas supplies would run out.
We wanted to get gas before the prices skyrocketed more than they already
had.

I remember seeing lines outside
of Red Cross Blood Donation centers.
People decided to donate from their very bodies, people who had not donated
before. I remember how much we wanted to
come together and provide for the people affected.

I remember that feeling of
unity, and then I remember a more powerful feeling mimicking that unity: hate.

In 2001, conservatives taught
me their knowledge of Islamic faith, about evil Middle Eastern countries, and
about Jihad. Not one bit of that
knowledge contained a sliver of untwisted truth – most justly racist and imperialistic
propaganda – but I learned that “those people” hated freedom and America.

I learned to hate the other. And I learned that patriotism required me to
hate.

And so I did. I supported a plan to turn the Middle East –
except Israel – into a glowing sheet of glass with our nuclear bombs. I wanted war so we could do…something…I
honestly have no idea what goal I thought the war had, but I wanted it.

We had an opportunity, 18 years
ago, to say that we care only about the content of your character and become a
nation of unending lines outside blood donation centers and responding to acts
of terror with love, compassion, and strength of character. We could have become the nation of our ideals
and our promises.

Instead we allowed the bigots,
racists, and war hawks to create a culture of hatred of the other. They convinced us that, if we did not hate
the other, we desired more attacks on our soil.
Many of us – especially young, impressionable minds like mine – just went
along with it.

“We’ll put a boot in your ass,
it’s the American way!” We rallied around
songs calling us to respond to terror with violence and hatred.

And please, do not misunderstand
me. Terrorists exist and desire to
create terror for some abstract and unattainable goal, but their religion serves
as a tool to their terror, not a cause. The
Muslim doctor in a hijab had no desire to kill me – or even convert me – as we
discussed DNR/DNI options with a patient during my CPE, and plenty of white,
Christian men have killed people this year alone in an attempt to do something
I cannot comprehend while using their “faith” as the justification.

We could have done better. We failed.
But maybe we can try to do better.

I will never forget. I will never forget images of first responders
running into the towers, condemning themselves to death in a futile attempt to save
people. I will never forget hearing the phone
calls from Flight 93 and the heroics of the passengers that saved lives. I will never forget the feeling of fear and
the realization that we, too, could experienced violence of that degree on our
mainland. I will never forget that
terrorists attacked us and want to destroy us.

But I will not let that memory become
a path to hate. If you want to do
something to remember, make this a day of charity and hospitality. Donate blood, donate to aid agencies, volunteer,
learn first aid, renew your CPR certification.

Make this a day of good, not a
day of justifying hatred and lifting up “good will” without doing anything.

A neat thing happens when I confess my struggles to my congregation: I suddenly can write about them publicly! When I say, in the middle of my sermon, “I am scared to preach and paralyzed every week,” no one I currently serve gets a huge surprise when I write about it for you 12-50 internet people, that number depending on random chance as far as I can tell.

I did not exaggerate or say anything close to untrue when I spoke those words a few Sundays ago. From the moment I got back from Festival of Homiletics, I have had constant, paralyzing fear when it comes to writing and giving sermons. I sat down on eight separate occasions – eight separate, scheduled occasions – to write my Pentecost sermon and I still, given four weeks of no sermons and nothing but time, wrote the manuscript at 7:00 P.M. the Saturday before.

To talk about this, I need to talk about the voices and “ghosts” who sit on my shoulders and make sure I constantly feel my inadequacy. But first, let me talk about how we valiantly try to make this feeling go away when we look at and prepare for professional ministry.

We had this thing we said in seminary as we discussed our inadequacies and “being not good enough” for ministry. The solution always came out as this answer: You aren’t good enough; get over it.

As a theological construct and encouragement, it fits the bill, more or less, kinda. God does not have adequate and perfect people to call to ministry, so God calls the likes of you and me. God sees my brokenness and inadequacy and calls me anyway, sometimes using that brokenness and inadequacy for holy things.

Great, wonderful, lean into that if it loosens your voice, but it does not help me a whole lot after eight years of preaching every Sunday with short interludes of every-other Sunday. It really does not help me as I feel more fear and trepidation “stepping into the pulpit” now than I ever have.

I found the fatal flaw in that mindset: we never addressed the fact that our discouragement does not come from God – remember, God called us to this wonderful and awful task – but from other broken people who will, at the drop of a hat, make sure I know exactly how terrible of a pastor and preacher I am.

I recently wrote a post called “Not Enough” about a lot of these feelings of inadequacy, but, as I finally decided to name the voices screaming in my ears every weeks as I try to prepare for the task God called me to, I can address the voices I alluded to.

One voice from the past screams in one ear: the “ghost” of my preaching professor. In January of 2012 I nearly left seminary. The professor tasked with preparing me to bring the Word of God to a congregation decided to prepare me through bullying, both his own and encouraging the class to participate.

(And before any apologists come forward, loving people I trust confirmed my experience. I have grown weary of people minimizing this experience, even nearly eight years later).

For the past few months, only his judgements and the “rules of homiletics” I break come to mind. You ever have inspiration, only to have a ghost say you are not allowed to do that? That defines my last few months.

But I have battled with this ghost of the past before and come out with an unhealthy but helpful chip on my shoulder. Now, though, something else screams in my other ear, giving the fear created by this ghost additional force and power.

Christian thought leaders have put a demand on clergy to constantly preach from a prophetic voice. A mainline leader of the church told the Festival of Homiletics to put pastoral care to the side and focus solely on preaching and prophecy. Progressive thought leaders demand people “leave their churches” if their pastors do not speak out against [insert new, weekly travesty].

As I sat at the Festival of Homiletics, I feel encouraged and convicted to do better and try harder. Upon arriving home, the weight of never living up to the standard these pastors and thought leaders set before us that week sat on my shoulders and has made my voice…shaky and scared. I participated in an alter call for preachers to speak out against the evils of the world – a thing I thought I did before but, in that moment, believed I had failed at – but now have no idea how I, Rev. Robert Glen Brown, pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, live up to that alter call.

Since then I have preached. But the pit in my stomach comes every week, and every week I feel a little bit more like a fraud because I did not do something someone “smarter” or “more important than me” would demand of me – or worse, intentionally did something they would look down upon.

I am scared to preach. Horrified, paralyzed, frozen; I have more fear today than I did that first week I preached during my first internship.

I once read something from a seminary professor – I think – confessing that he often told students that preaching gets easier when, in fact, it actually gets harder. (If anyone reading this knows this piece, shoot me a link, please.) When I first read that, I believed it but I could not actualize or internalize it. Every Sunday, though, despite feeling more skilled and having more experience, it feels harder.

It gets harder. The expectations – both real and imagined – of congregations for good preachers to always preach well, the world constantly finding new ways to cast people into the darkness, and thought leaders telling small church leaders that they need to live into the ministry and preaching models of megachurches make it harder every Sunday, every season, every year.

I do not want anyone to express sympathy or support in response to this; my people have supported me more than I realize more days, and I got a powerful and confidence-boosting affirmation on Sunday that I needed.

I just need to say it. And, if you happen to be/know one of those thought leaders who demands small church leaders abandon their good ministries for activist, megachurch, prophet models, maybe try to remember what small church ministry looks like/spend some time serving a small church.

I am trying, and I do not need more voices condemning my efforts. The ghosts of seminary have that job taken care of enough.

I can own my personal frustration and purported hopelessness as of late. I read my public writing – and especially my personal writing – and I can see how one might read my as hopeless. I want things to go differently, I want a different world and/or a different situation constantly.

But I am still here, and I am not running away from anything.

I read the same church statistics as everyone else. I read the same news as everyone else. I see the same chaos and decimation as everyone else.

And I want to do something! I want to fix the problems – or at least lessen the pain a bit. I want to use my voice, my privilege, and my position to improve the world. I want to improve my congregation and my denomination beyond its current brokenness.

And I feel hopeless like everyone else. I do things and it does not help. I say things and no one who need to hear will listen and internalize what I say. I find myself silent when I have thoughts on difficult topics and can feel that no one wants to hear my opinion for a host of reasons.

I feel that tug of knowing I need to do something and struggling to understand what that “thing” is. I know others feel this way; you have told me as much.

And in this moment of frustration, fear, anger, and ineffectiveness, you can start to see things fatalistically – that we cannot affect the course of history and everything is predetermined. And you may want to write off everything as doomed in this state of frustration, anger, and fear.

“Let it burn to the grown and dance in the ashes!”

But I find myself angry and tortured not because I have given up, but because I refuse to. We can do something to make this world better, even if just a tiny bit. We can do something to make our churches better, even if it does not return our past glory. We can, but we just have not figured out how, yet.

This continues to torture me – I still jump back and forth between “outrage” and “outrage hangover” on an hourly basis – but I refuse to become fatalist in my frustration and pain. It may kill me and my soul, but I will never not believe it can be better and I can do something, even if that “thing” seems indiscernable in the moment.

We live in a dark time, but not an insurmountable and irredeemable time. Let us stop diagnosing the world and the church as terminal and instead live in our fury and internal torture.

Question for preachers and worship leaders: how often do you tell the people you lead that God makes them enough? How often – especially if you come from the Reform tradition – do you tell them about their inadequacy but how the Spirit will work within them and make them enough?

I do this often, bordering on weekly. Maybe I do not use so many words, but I do it essentially every Sunday.

I have started to struggle with this idea. I do not want to imply I disbelieve in this whole process of the Spirit empowering us beyond ourselves, but I keep finding myself inherently “not enough.” I do not even know how to describe it, but I keep running into things in my life and ministry that require me to “be more” of whatever that situation require:

I am not woke enough. I do not march, I do not protest, I do not do enough of the things our “thought leaders” and “prophets” demand all clergy do. No one would confuse me for an activist pastor.

I am not apolitical enough. I have lost members for speaking out against child separation already and I had a member refuse to talk to me after my last sermon.

I am not tall enough. Thank God I have a powerful voice.

I am not hip enough. I lead a liturgical service with standard movements, and I feel comfortable and empowered there.

I am not traditional enough. I cannot just use the Book of Common Worship; I must change the language, make it inclusive, and soften it. I try to be playful in the liturgy, making it less formal and more relaxed, which means people who grew up with the traditional liturgy get lost sometimes – especially those who struggle with hearing.

And continue ad infinitum. I could go on for days about the ways the world and leaders on our faith have implied – both directly and generically applying to me – that I am not enough. God did not make me enough for…anything, it seems. I can have a good ministry but even then, it feels as if I should feel shame over how I do not do something enough.

I feel this demand to fit into a label to find any sort of community or acceptable ministry. My pastoral ministry feels irrelevant to everything because we now live in a time of overt evil that demands constant, constant attention.

Wil Willimon told the Festival of Homiletics that pastors care too much about pastoral care and too little about their prophetic voice. John Pavlovitz told people to leave their churches if their pastors did too little to speak out against the evils of today.

I lost members to this already. I have to walk a tightrope of prophecy while also needing my members to not hate me before I show up at the ER, the surgery ward, or the funeral home. I can only speak so loudly, but the thought leaders demand loud and constant voices, implying we can only be true to Christ if we march with our signs at every opportunity.

I am not enough, and I keep running into that fact. Hell, I am not enough of anything to even find community here – not liberal enough, not conservative enough, not heteronormative enough, not queer enough, not political enough, not apolitical enough, not nerdy enough, not geeky enough, not dumb enough, not confident enough, not humble enough, not weird enough, not normal enough, not anything enough. I have no strong labels, making me feel like the world sees me as personification of Revelation 3:16: “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

I know I bring severe feelings of inadequacy and inferiority to this, but I want to know: how do the rest of you preachers and worship leaders know you are enough? I know God chose me for this work and called me – the Spirit has made my ministries too effective to doubt – but how do I shake this feeling?

Is it just the Age of Polarization and Trump? Is it a thing about Urban Ministry I did not understand coming in? Am I actually not enough and just did not realize it before?

I did not write this for sympathy. Yes, I will own existential pain drives this a bit, but I also find myself angry. When someone says my parishioners should leave my church if I do not do something but leave that something vague, and no one can tell me how much I must do to not deserve my church dying, what should I do? How much is enough for the prophets and thought leaders?

I take exception to a call to exodus without so much as a sliver of guidance for the pastors you threaten with exodus. I take exception to condemning ministries without a conversation about the day-to-day of solo pastoral ministry and trying to help struggling churches find their way in the world that includes more than protesting – like care, fellowship, discipleship, and teaching.

I just wish I was enough. The Spirit gave me a pastoral heart and a strong voice, but that is not enough, so it seems.

Anyone else? Am I alone here? Or are other pastors starting to feel it? And please, for all that is holy, I did not write this for someone to patronize me and softly tell me, “You are enough, it’s just tough.” I want to know:

Am I alone in feeling that I cannot possibly be enough in 2019, or are other pastors feeling it, too?

I would never consider myself an ally. I do not have the strength to stand up like my stronger colleagues and march with our LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers, especially in the complicated political time and place that I find myself.

I know “complicated political time and place” is nothing more than an excuse, but it is my excuse and I love it!

But in this month, as we remember Stonewall and give opportunity for those who society relegated to the shadows to stands in the beautiful light of day, I have a thought rolling around in my mind:

How can anyone looking at themselves in the mirror and see themselves as made in God’s imaged and then look at another human being and see them as an abomination somehow less than and not made in God’s image?

I will not go into the exegesis and theological discussion of homosexuality and sin – much, much smarter people than me have tackled that task already. I simply want to know how anyone can look at someone else and believe God did not make them in God’s image. I want to know how you can choose one thing you perceive as sinful and that one thing makes someone an abomination while God still loves you despite the host of sins that tarnish your soul.

I recently had coffee with a college friend and, like you always do, we started to reminisce and talk about who we were back when. She pointed out that, in college, my politics never lined up with my desire for compassion and love, and I often did feel the tension between my “conservative Christian politics” and my actual Christian values.

I never fully owned the title “conservative”, but I always found myself leaning toward Republicans. I started to believe the little racist things like “I want White Entertainment Television!” and “Affirmative Action is just as racist as the racism it’s trying to fix!” At the same time, I still believed in loving people and felt compassion for the marginalized and the outcast.

I think the first crack in my conservative politics came from Acts. I grew up with the knowledge that “socialism is evil and just ‘Communism-Lite’”, but readings Acts give you a very different view of communal living and resource sharing:

“44All the believers were united and shared everything. 45They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them. 46Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. 47They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved.”

My conservative beliefs came from people who held the Bible as the ultimate truth and yet praised the values of unfettered and unregulated capitalism that encouraged the abuse of workers so the wealthy could have more. Throughout the gospels Jesus gives special care and consideration to the poor and broken, yet the very people who claimed Christianity supported politics that harmed those same people Jesus took special care of.

As I dug deeper – and also started seminary – I found myself moving left (in American political terms). I found myself realizing my broader theology did not line up some of hotter single-issue position that I held. Relevant to this month, my position on homosexual ordination did not line up with the broader theologies of universal brokenness and everyone being made in the image of God.

(I hadn’t quite gotten to a point where I would see homosexuality as not sinful; it takes me time to change, like any good Presbyterian.)

It still, 8 years later, fascinates me how vitriolically and hatefully people started treating me. I would have still considered myself conservative (in black and white terms) at that point and yet I failed the “Good Christian” check of needing to see homosexuals as sinful and homosexuality as a choice.

And mind you, I hadn’t even touched the waters of non-binary gender or other sexualities. I had failed them – which, even typing it, seems asinine – and I needed to either fall in line or accept my relegation as a liberal heathen.

As I continued to study, to learn, and to grow, I kept moving left. I recently attributed this movement to the centerline moving right, but I have also walked left, I suppose. We have values in the United States that we claim as Christian that often exist outside the prevue of scriptures but more often exist in conflict to the words and ideals of Christ we have recorded in our scriptures.

Not the point, though. The larger point exists as this: as I have grown and learned, I have come to realized that God made every person – of every sexuality, gender, and race – in God’s own image, and every one of them has the capacity to minister and share God’s word. No one exist who does not reflect the image of God despite our own personal biases, bigotries, and discomforts.

I have not gotten to the point where I do enough to call myself an ally, I fail “Woke Checks” on a constant basis, I am certainly not liberal enough to be trendy or traditional enough to be orthodox, but I see you, I love you, and I want you to share God’s word in a way that I can’t.

And to my sisters and brothers who can see someone as anything other than a reflection of the creator: how? And how dare you?

Go read last week’s sermon as a prelude to this. I preached that sermon as the Word of God–as ordained ministers do from the pulpit–and though I still struggle to believe I could possibly give the Word of God, if I do that, preaching that sermon gave the Word of God.

I–the guy who writes this blog–have more to say that does not qualify as the Word of God. I want to follow-up with on how our divisions shatter our world and how we should approach the crisis of today.

I believe we live in a crisis state. The United States had a policy of separating families–including infants–who illegally crossed the border, many wanting to claim asylum but found themselves unable due to boarder stations not processing people attempting to enter the country. The United States has deported parents without their young children. The United States has an active and growing resurgence of vocal and violent racism that claims moral superiority not unlike the Ku Klux Klan before them.

The United States currently exists in deep, painful, and life-threatening crisis of evil, both in the philosophical sense and a real, practical, and horrifying sense for many populations within her land.

I believe the crisis is a an opportunistic infection of a much different disease.

The disease is hateful, vitriolic division.

Do not misunderstand my point. The opportunistic infection can and will kill us. I do not write this to downplay the dire crisis situation we find ourselves in. We need to cure the infection or what we know as the United States will die.

As we seek to cure the infection and heal the damage caused, we need to desperately need to understand what allowed such an infection to happens and treat the problems so it cannot happen again.

I want to start with a troubling Twitter hashtag I saw over the past few days that exemplifies our vitriolic division. #CivilWar2 has declared war between Democrats and Republicans. Mind you, the declaration does not go against the infection but against other parts of the body. It declares a political philosophy morally correct and refuses to accept dissent. It demonized half of the country and tells those who would gladly join the cause of fighting the infection to fall in line with their political philosophy or suffer the consequences, driving those potential allies into the welcoming arms of the crisis-makers.

I do not speak of new things. I remember hearing in college–my much more conservative days–that voting Republican means I want women to get cancer. I remember hearing in my youth–as my mind and philosophies formed–that voting Democrat means I want to murder babies. I remember hearing that standing right of the line means hating black people. I remember hearing standing left of the line means I cannot call myself Christian.

I wrote no exaggerations. Someone told me each one of those things, each multiple times. As I stepped right, someone called me evil; as I stepped left, someone else called me evil.

I can picture their faces. I do not exaggerate; people called my changing and evolving positions evil, often adding stupid and immature to the mix.

I could only learn one lesson aside from than how lonely I would feel desiring and working toward politics and ministries of reconciliation and subtly: disagreeing would force me to the outside. Not having a tribe forced me to the margin, and we have no tribe for subtle, strong centrists who desire the best policies for universal love, universal survival, and universal growth.

I am not evil. I am not stupid. I am not immature. My growth marked improvements in each of those areas, and multiple someones called my growth each of those things.

When everything that you disagree with is evil, nothing is evil. When everything you disagree with is stupid, nothing is stupid. When everything you disagree with is immature, nothing is immature.

I have finally arrived at the root of the problem as I see it. We live in a unique crisis of evil. I cannot state that any differently. We live in a unique crisis of evil.

We have so overused that word and vitriolically divided ourselves into two tribes and killed all dissent that when we actually have something evil in front of us, we have no way to call it as such. By writing this someone will believe I said, “Republicans are evil!” By writing this, someone will believe I said those who speak out angrily should not be so uncivil. By writing this, someone will hear a political message.

We all did this by politically dividing our stances on morality and evil. I found myself marginalized by the American political dichotomy, but I have my tribes, as well. I find myself ready and willing to tear down other denominations for what I want to call evil when they simply interpret the Bible differently. I have wholesale condemned people who believe in “Ecclesiastical Separation.”

I can name them as easily as I can name those who condemned me.

We have called the other evil for so long that when evil appears in great force, we cannot call it as such for fear of sounding political or do speak up only to have that fear painfully realized.

Our hateful, vitriolic divisions allowed this to happen. We allowed this to happen and shattered the safeguards that would have prevented it in the name of political expediency. We found ourselves shocked that evil could take advantage when we opened the doors wide open.

This crisis can kill us. The opportunistic evil that comes from our divisions can and will kill us. We felt morally superior as we allowed this to happen and patted ourselves on the back.

I ask this of every #CivilWar2 political activist:

When this war you declared ends, do you plan to call the other side “our countrymen (sic) again”? Or do you plan to shoot your guns off and make sure they know you won and demonize them, furthering the divide between you and those who would stand as your allies?

If we would stop dividing ourselves, and especially stop dividing the Body of Christ, we could fight evil. Now we have to watch it do its work until we can stand united again.

I am reaching out to you, asking that you ignore our divisions and stand united against the crisis of evil we currently live in. We shattered the safeguard; help me rebuild it.

Note: I usually do a series during the summer, and I guess this summer’s series became “Difficult, challenging, pointed sermons preached from a manuscript.” I do not plan to continue it, but this sermons certainly matches last week’s sermon in difficulty.

“I did this. We did this.” The poems of Lamentations land like a self-inflicted gut-punch, reading like a mournful and terrible confession of realization. “I did this. We did this.”

At what point do we admit that we broke the world? When do we finally say, “I did this. We did this.”? At what point do we stop pretending we are the rain drop that did not cause the flood or slow flake that did not participate in the avalanche and finally just say, “I did this. We did this.”?

We divided ourselves based upon our own rules. We declared all who disagree stupid, evil, non-Christian, and burned every bridge between us that we could.

We named dissent and difference of opinion evil. We called so much disagreement and dissent evil that evil no longer has meaning and we no longer have language to recognize the abhorrent as such.

We allowed evil to happen in the name of political party. We ignored the failings of those we agreed with, allowing their greed and power-seeking activity to continue because we agreed with them in spoken philosophy.

We withheld love.

When do we finally say, “I did this. We did this.”?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The poet laments God’s wrath. The poet feels the pain of God’s wrath and cannot help but lament.

How does God express God’s wrath?

Does God actively punish the poet and his people? Does God actively bolster and strengthen the soldiers of the poet’s enemies and actively weaken and undermine the efforts of the soldiers of the poet’s people? Does God actively force the poet’s people into a foreign exile and actively allow the destruction of the temple?

Or does God allow the natural consequences of their sins to take root? Do the sins of the poet’s people weaken them naturally, spread them too thin and make them too confident? Do the natural consequences of their sins condemn them to failure without God’s intervention?

Or did the poet just feel abandoned when the sins of the poet’s people finally lead to their destruction and demise? Did sin finally cause so much damage the poet’s people imploded upon themselves.

The specifics do not matter to the poet. God’s wrath is pain and destructions. The poet laments God’s wrath.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Why does the poet lament? Why does the poet “passionately express grief or sorrow”? What right does the poet have to lament? The poet himself says it. “Why should any living [person] complain when punished for [their] sins?” What right do we have to complain? We did this to ourselves.

Our sin condemned us. We became complacent. We forgot God. We abused our resources and ourselves. Our sin—not the sin of someone else but our sin—lead to our demise.

Why do we complain and mourn? Why do we complain when we did this to ourselves and why do we mourn what our sin caused us to lose? Why do we lament our world? We did this. We broke our world.

We did not speak out. We saw evil and we remained silent.

We continued to participate in the divide. We threw insults and slung mud and dehumanized the “other”—even our friends and family—because they disagreed.

We turned our backs on those in need. We used a policy of “worth” and “true need” to determine who we did not turn our backs on.

We congratulated ourselves for our sins. We patted ourselves on the back for deepening the divide and celebrated how much “good” we did while we withheld love from those most in need.

Why do we lament our broken world? We broke it and celebrated the initial wreckage.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The poet laments not feeling God. He may have no right to lament, but he laments out of pain and without anything else to do. And the poet laments the sin that brought him and his people to this point.

In his lament, the poet sees the path to healing: “Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord. Let us lift up our hearts and our hands to God in heaven.”

The poet calls his people to repent. The poet calls his people to confess their sin and own it, realizing that they did this. The poet calls his people to turn from their sin and return to the life and path God intended for them.

And the poet calls his people to lift their hearts to God.

The poet will continue to suffer even as he starts on this path. This path of healing does not immediately relieve pain but much like rehab after tragedy, the healing this path provides will hurt.

But healing will come.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We lament as we look at our world and God appears so far away.

Suffering happens in our back yard. Sex trafficking—the sale and abuse of human beings—happens less than three miles from this sanctuary.

Suffering happens to the weakest and the least. I need not name specifics; we all know what happens to the least of God’s children.

Suffering happens in the name of greed and power. I am reminded daily of the suffering and torment our sisters and brothers in Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia suffer to simply satiate the whims of power of those with guns and soldiers.

Suffering happens, and we stand in complacence or participation as the world breaks.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We must repent, confessing our sin, owning our sin, and turning away from our sin. We must do what God desires and what will heal our world.

We must speak up instead of closing our eyes to the suffering and torment the sins of our world cause.

We must bridge our divisions that have allowed politicized evil to not only happen but stand as the norm instead of the deviation.

We must vocally abhor evil from all evil doers, especially those who look and think like us.

Our repentance will not immediately relieve the pain of our sin or heal our world. Our sin has shattered our world and the shattered world we have created will require extensive, painful healing. Nothing will heal quickly or painlessly.

But if we lament our shattered world and our sin and we repent, confessing and turning away from our sin, healing will come.

I lament our shattered world though my sin shattered it. I try to repent of the sin I lament. I seek the painful healing our world desperately needs.